For reasons that are entirely too amusing to be believable, I was once trapped with a Texas beauty queen in the cab of a beat-up pickup truck that was making its way over dirt roads at a frustratingly bumpy twenty-five miles an hour. We both knew we would be all of the evening and most of the night in reaching our destination.

The radio shrieked with sharp static bursts every time the pickup encountered any irregularity in the road (which was always). So the beauty queen and I had no real alternative but to make conversation.

Her opening conversational gambit, I'll admit, was a tad on the provocative side. "People get in such a huff about creation versus evolution," she sighed. "But I don't see what the big deal is. I mean, I believe in both."

"Both?" I asked.

"Yeah, I think God made Adam and Eve and that the real people, the children of God, are descended from Adam and Eve. But I also believe in evolution. Nature saw how powerful God's children were and spent millions of years trying to imitate them. And the imitations are so convincing that even the children of God are fooled. That's why some couples can't have children. When a child of God marries a child of the apes, they can't reproduce."

Brian DePalma's sense of genetics in Mission to Mars is about as sophisticated and imaginative as that beauty queen's. He shrugs off the chance to examine some extremely thoughtful and challenging ideas (ideas that, even DePalma would have to confess, we already know are thoughtful and challenging because of the scrutiny to which Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick subjected them in 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Kurt Vonnegut tells a pretty imaginative story in The Sirens of Titan (I think) about how the Tralfamadorians need to get a very particular piece of machinery to one of their damaged ships in our solar system. But since it would take longer to get the piece here from Tralfamador than to populate the earth with a species capable of manufacturing and delivering the missing piece, the Tralfamadorians decide to create life on earth that will evolve for the sole purpose of fixing the stranded ship.

The power of Vonnegut's story lies in the fact that humans turn out not to be central to the universe, but to be ancillary beings whose significance can only be understood mechanically, not cosmically. Perhaps the reason that DePalma's story is so uncompelling is that after all the mishaps and deaths in the film, we learn that we humans really are at the center of it all, that we are the children of a great human project that is only waiting to embrace us for the feat of having travelled to Mars.

According to a particular graphical sequence in the movie, the uber-humans seeded planets throughout the universe with primitive life. On earth, that life evolves into humans with the precise genetic code that turns out to be the key to gaining acceptance from the uber-humans. In other words, the story is not only less powerful than Vonnegut's, but more absurd. And at least with a writer like Vonnegut, you know you're supposed to be laughing.

I don't think DePalma had my laughter in mind when he put this idiotic piece of nonsense together. But he got it. There's really nothing else to do in the face of such an expensively made patchwork. Anyone who wants to take so many pains to give us relatively convincing portrayals of a zero-gravity environment should have hunted around for a more convincing--or at least a more interesting--script.

Bear with me as I work through just a tiny bit of math. We have four astronauts in spacesuits being tugged toward the Martian atmosphere. One has no fuel left in his jetpack. The other three all have roughly the same amount. Let's call that amount X. The one without fuel is in danger because he cannot make his way to a satellite that is going (rather impossibly) to be landed on Mars. But the other three are on the satellite. The wife of the endangered astronaut expends 50% of her fuel in floating out towards her husband and then attempts to rescue him with a tether that doesn't quite reach him. According to everyone around her, if she expends even a single droplet of fuel to get closer to her husband she'll never make it back to the satellite.

Now I'll agree that she won't make it all the way back. But let's say she uses just 10% of her fuel to get the tether to her husband. That leaves her with .4X amount of fuel to go back towards the satellite. She won't make it all the way back, but she will make it past the point that she regarded as the point of no return (because that's what her nifty computerized wristband said it was).

What good could possibly come from such a maneuver?

None at all, unless somebody bothers to remember that there are two other astronauts on the satellite, both with X fuel in their jetpacks, either of whom could go out to bring back the other two astronauts as soon as they got past the point of no return.

But the stranded astronaut has to die because he is played by Tim Robbins, who presumably wanted out of the movie just as desperately as reasonable audiences wanted to get out of the theaters in which Mission to Mars was playing.

I really shouldn't bother talking about the plotholes in Mission to Mars because the plot itself is merely a melange of every space-whimsy that has ever occurred to a Hollywood screenwriter. Neither is there any point in evaluating the performances (all of them empty) because the circumstances make the characters impossible to believe in and unworthy of relating to.

I'll admit that DePalma seems to have a genuine (and endearing) fascination with the idea of a zero-gravity environment. And his special effects on that score, though not breathtaking, did an adequate job of helping me to indulge myself in a fantasy of absolute weightlessness. But the scenes are so pompously self-conscious and contrived that it's hard even to commend DePalma for his technical prowess.

Mission to Mars concludes with Gary Sinise's character blasting off from Mars in a capsule provided by the uber-humans. As the capsule rockets toward a nebula, Sinise's fellow astronauts look at it wistfully from the safety of the Emergency Recovery Vehicle that they will be taking back to Earth. The film is so cheesy that when the words The End appeared under the nebula into which Sinise's capsule had vanished, I honestly expected a huge question mark to appear after a few beats.

It didn't. But it should have.



Recommended: No